[This week's guest post is by Jane Finnis, Director, Culture24

Portal pain and Wikipedia love

Why is the European Commission still convinced that people want their online culture served up via a hideously named “one-stop-shop” portal?

Last Wednesday, instead of watching the new episode of Mad Men, I sat down to read the latest EU report (120 pages) and the first of its nine recommendations goes like this:  “Develop, implement and promote an online access point and guide to ‘European culture’ for all cultural disciplines using a ‘one-stop-shop’ approach linking to the multitude of already existing offers, improving these where appropriate, enhanced by Web 2.0 and other functionalities…”

Save us please! Isn’t it even an oxymoron to have one-stop-shop and web 2.0 in the same sentence?

Surely as user attention online gets ever more competitive, it is the services and sites which have a clear personality, voice, specialism, community of enthusiasts etc that will be the doorways people choose to explore their love of animation, design, archaeology, Folk Art or whatever?

It is a shame, as the report itself is actually pretty interesting and the wealth of stuff happening across almost all the European countries is staggering and most of it didn’t exist 5 years ago.

Let’s hope that others feel the same and through the application of some of the other more sensible recommendations like physical meetings and provision of training, we can get the message across that the web has moved on and so should the EU.

You can download the summary and recommendations here or download the full report here (warning: it’s long!) here.

I also wanted to pick up on a conversation on the MuseumNext Ning site recently that caught my eye: “would funders ever accept that you’re spending their money on staff time editing Wikipedia rather than putting together a shiny new web presence which they can point at and be proud of?”

For some time I’ve been playing with an idea to try and fundraise to do exactly this. Maybe it might be a great way to deal with the current Renaissance underspend?

I’m going to take the idea to the Wikimedia workshop at this years Museums and Web conference and am interested in talking to anyone else who would like to help me make it happen.

Thought for the week: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”  Harry S. Truman

This week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the Bits 2 Blogs e-learning event at Teesside University, hosted by MLA. A fantastic event and with some inspirational speakers focussing on some great online and digital media projects. One thing that stuck in my mind was the work by the guys at FriiSpray. This allows people to create digital, or virtual graffiti as an interactive media installation. Its current uses, especially for those with special needs are of particular interest for museums but talks about graffiti projections onto buildings is exciting.

I was surprised this week to discover museums have started pulling out of Flickr Commons. The latest this week was Hampshire County Council, who has posted a warning to anyone else considering joining flickr on their blog this week. In the past couple of years quite a few UK institutions have joined the specialist section of the photo sharing site and makes me wonder where museums will turn next. Hartlepool Museums service are currently in talks with Flickr about joining the Commons and it does make me pause and wonder if we should. But if not on Flickr, where would we go? Is Wikimedia the next best thing?

Also this week, Jim Richardson’s Museum Marketing blog highlights a new feature on Google Analytics that monitors the number of visits from mobiles. I found it fascinating to see how many people are visiting the Hartlepool Museum websites on mobile devices. From the comments posted, it appears that only a small percentage of people are viewing museum websites on their mobile devices. I would like to see the figures in either six months or a year and see the change. I suspect that we may see a drastic increase in visits from mobile phones as more smart phones are sold.

Last week, the Museum of Hartlepool hosted an event for the A History of the World project, with a Victorian style curiosity show, with some of our more unusual objects. From this, we managed to get several objects not only added to the local site, but one was even donated to the museum. Great to see how an onsite event can bring people together to produce some amazing online work.

The announcement of Google Buzz at the beginning of the month, was filled with excitement and then disappointment for some, myself include. What I found interesting was the number of museums that are on Buzz. As of this week, there does not appear to be any national museums, but I am interested to see how they are using it and whether this is something that UK institutions will start to get involved in. I am reluctant to put Hartlepool Museums on at the moment, particularly since I’m not entirely sure how many of my followers are using Buzz. Do I really need something else I need to check in the morning? Only time will tell. It took Twitter until Jan 2009 to become extremely popular, 3 years after it was introduced, so maybe we should give Buzz a chance.

[This week's guest post is by Danny Birchall, editor of the Wellcome Collection website]

A remarkable gallery closed its doors on Valentine’s Day. The Museum of Everything was a temporary collection of outsider art in a former recording studio in Primrose Hill. It brought together artists from beyond the art world’s mainstream, like Henry Darger, George Widener and Josef Karl Rädler (whose work appeared in Wellcome Collection’s own Madness and Modernity ). The museum was very much IRL rather than online, but it’s interesting to see that they make no distinctions between mainstream news and blogs in their page devoted to ‘press’ coverage.

‘Book’ might become as abstract a concept as ‘press’ if iBooks establish the same reach as iTunes, but could AAAARG become the Ubuweb of theory books? In an interview with Masters of Media , AAAARG founder Sean Dockray discusses the website created to share and discuss hard-to-find texts. While treading a fine line between acceptable use and cease-and-desist letters, Dockray takes what he calls a ‘positive’ approach: “at the root of it all, I hope we’re all on the same side, which is to say that we’re interested in the dissemination of ideas”.

The Digital Economy Bill, just through its committee stage in the Lords, is threatening to put photographers and cultural organisations at each others’ throats. In a letter to The Times two weeks ago, culture org big cheeses from the BFI’s Amanda Nevill to the Tate’s Nicholas Serota came out strongly in favour of the Bill’s Clause 42 which liberalises regulations on the use of orphan works, arguing the greater benefits to education and research. This week,some photographers were up in arms about the potential threat to photographers’ livelihoods. It must be serious: Facebook groups have been formed .

When financial woe approaches the arts and heritage sectors from all sides, even the highest-profile organisations aren’t immune. The debate about the grand old dame of the avant-garde, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, continued in the grand old dame of net/art publications, Mute magazine. In a lengthy, and heavily-commented article , JJ Charlesworth investigated the financial crisis at the heart of the ICA’s current round of redundancies. Further debate took place on the Net Behaviour list . It might not be surprising that criticism of the ICA should come from these quarters: the ICA conspicuously turned its back on (new) media art two years ago.

While the announcement of Google’s Buzz seemed to raise more hackles about invasions of privacy than it did industry cheers, my social media dilemma this week was wondering which museum Ning networks I should join. A network I joined last year, Screen Research, was closed in January by its creator, the British Library’s Luke McKernan because even with 300+ members it was “hard to justify the effort needed to keep the site effective” (don’t worry, the indefatigable McKernan hasn’t given up, he’s just refocused his efforts on the BL’s Moving Image blog). I realised that while Screen Research was a community that I felt a strong identification with, it wasn’t one that I contributed to often. While the supermarkets of social media like Facebook and Buzz may seem unstoppable, some of our online communities may be more precious, like local independent bookshops: use them or lose them.

On MuseumNext’s Ning network, Finkelstein asked provocatively whether, with the proliferation of social media platforms, the museum website is dead. The answer seemed to be a resounding no, combined with a recognition that “a museum must be in all places at once”. For the discovery of said debate I owe the obligatory HT to @m1ke_ellis because of course where I find out what museum/tech people are actually talking to each other about is still Twitter.

Linda Spurdle

[This week's guest post is by Linda Spurdle, Online Resources Manager at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery]

I think I may be cheating to focus on my week in ‘cultural heritage online’ rather than any big news stories, but worries about budget cuts, the desire to develop innovative projects and the need to pursue funding have been my main concerns of the week.

On Tuesday I attended a funding surgery for the Digital Content Development Fund at Arts Council West Midlands. We discussed an idea that is in the early stages of research and development. I had hoped to make an application to JISC’s  Developing Community Collections Fund but JISC put this on ice in December 2009. This was because HEFCE decided to re-evaluate what it was going to fund in the light of cuts to their budget. The good news of the week is that this funding stream has now been reinstated. BMAG is working with the Interactive Cultures team at Birmingham City University to submit a proposal.

This week the news story broke that Birmingham City Council is to cut jobs, possibly including posts at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. These are difficult times for many museums but BMAG is extremely lucky to have some exciting projects in development, such as the Birmingham History Galleries project and the plan to acquire the Staffordshire Hoard.

Jim Richardson’s ‘Follow A Museum’ initiative appears to be continuing to have a positive effect on the number of followers we have on Twitter. @BM_AG has seen a faster rise in the number of followers since the 1st February event than it did before. We first started to use Twitter in October 2009 when the Staffordshire Hoard came to BMAG and it has been great to see @StokeMuseums tweeting away about the Hoard this week ahead of the exhibition opening there on February 13th.

It was interested to read the results of Mia Ridge’s survey  ‘is it friendly or weird when a museum twitter account follows you back?‘. We continue to follow most people back, but now I find myself hovering over the ‘follow’ button wondering if it is what that person wants!

BECTA have commissioned a video about the BETT 2010 award winners which includes BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource.  On Thursday a film crew went down to Lordswood Boys’ School in Birmingham to film a class of Year 8 kids using the website. The kids then visited BMAG and were filmed looking at some of the paintings they had examined in class. When they entered the Pre-Raphaelite galleries they were quick to recognise the paintings they had viewed and there was a lovely energy as they crowded around to look. They were asked if they preferred seeing the pictures on the web or in the gallery. All thirteen boys answered ‘in the gallery’. Just the way it should be!

This week started strongly with Follow a Museum day. Jim wrote last week about putting it together and I guess everybody tweeting for a museum will agree it was a success. According to the comments most participating museums had between 4 and 6 times more new followers than on an average day.

Apart from the new followers, I am most happy with the variety of ways in which museums around the globe are engaging with their audiences. It’s inspiring to see what they do and the effects it has for them.

Also this week, Google announced it was stopping support for IE 6, starting with Google Docs. This is a good development, I think, as this old browser makes many of our online projects so much more difficult and expensive. It is said that making your online project IE 6 compatible can eat away up to 10% of your development budget. Imagine what we could do with this extra money…

The Museum Global Ranking 2009 was presented this week. Steadily on top: the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their online presence sits at the top of a survey of some 700 other museums.

I’m not really sure it’s a new thing, but the fourth thing that struck my eye is Europeana Labs. The team behind Europeana will make big steps towards making their software open source this year. This will help all heritage institutions to build upon their work on the semantic web.

The Europeana portal will contain some 10 million items by the end of the year, which makes it probably the biggest collection of European cultural heritage.

Finally, today we celebrate Facebook’s sixth birthday. Congratulations Facebook! The social network has changed the world, in a way. People find jobs, get fired, propose and unfriend, all online.

Cultural institutions also have discovered the platform. ‘Follow a Museum’ Jim is writing a series of blogposts on Facebook and a museum’s presence there. Maybe one day soon we’ll have a “Become fan of a museum” day too.

(NB. What most struck my eye this week had nothing to do with cultural heritage online. It was the biggest self-portrait ever. A must see!)

The big technology news this week has undoubtedly been the iPad, which was announced by Steve Jobs in California on Wednesday. Whether you’re a fan of Apple or not, it would be brave to bet against the iPad being a success.

The iPad gives us yet another device to consider when creating digital content and with its iPhone operating system and lack of a Flash media player, could provide web designers with another reason to move towards more accessible content.

My iPhone has provided me with much entertainment this week as I have tried out Foursquare, one of many location based games which seem to be gaining popularity in the States and slowly trickling through to the UK.

Foursquare lets you log in to a location like a museum, restaurant or bar and gain points for leaving a comment or a review. While this hasn’t really taken off in the UK yet, I was interested to read visitor reviews as I checked in to museums and galleries in London this week.

While Foursquare uses GPS to fix your location, I came across an interesting film from Japan of content which is accessed via a QR Code captured on a phones camera.

I think that location aware mobile applications are going to be the big technology story of 2010, and the heritage sector could create exciting and innovative uses for this.

Finally, I have spent much of this week preparing for the first Follow a Museum on Twitter Day which will take place on Monday. This is an initiative to encourage more people on the micro-blogging website to engage with a museum.

True to the nature of Twitter, Follow a Museum Day has brought together institutions from around the globe who will work together to spread the word about each other.

Taking the baton from Mike Ellis to share some links and comments on stuff this week, it’s been hard to focus on what I’ve found interesting in our profession, as my attention has been so taken by the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. It does prompt reflection for us in that much of a capital city has been destroyed, including historic buildings and the lives and works of some practising artists. I can’t imagine how we would deal with that. Scientists now think that extreme storms, increasing in frequency with climate change, can trigger earthquakes. The susceptibility of  Haiti to natural disasters (repeated floods & hurricanes) is probably due to deforestation by its French colonisers. So much of the value of cultural heritage institutions has been about preserving things and buildings, but in some places like Haiti and as time goes on for many more places, that may become a very difficult challenge. That’s one reason why I believe digitisation of culture and knowledge is so important (as long as we do it as efficiently as we can). And digital tools aren’t just useful for posterity but for the ‘here and now’, for example in the way they’ve been so rapidly deployed to help the rescue effort, with satellite maps and data services for locating relatives and so on.

I wonder if the ‘emergency’ facing our sector, in the form of funding cuts to education and culture, will give us the impetus to deploy digital tools in more agile ways. This week both the Conservative and Labour parties made funding statements for culture at the RSA State of the Arts conference. Here’s a useful comparison and summary. In a scenario of funding cuts can we convince politicians that digital strategy can actually save money and produce value, and not just be a drain on budgets, with vague outcomes?

As we run up to the election, our various quangos are jostling to advocate the value of culture either through bold statements (like this from NMDC), through holding expert enquiries (like this from MLA) or through consultations (like this from ACE).

In the meantime, there is much to celebrate as museums & culture shift towards openness and collaboration. Here are two great examples:

The BBC and British Museum launched their major History of the World project. A positive reception has been obvious from so many tweets from regional partners announcing their contributions and schools getting excited about adding objects to it (e.g. Thomas Tallis @creativetallis on twitter).

The other good news is Culture24 releasing some sets of data feeds (venues, resources, events/exhibitions) with 3 levels of access (open, redacted, full), available in RSS, OAI-MPH & SOAP formats. This is just a pilot with more data & formats in the pipeline.

There’ll be more news to come over the next few weeks about open cultural data (for example about Culture Grid and DCMS digital strategies) and I’m pretty sure you in the Museums Computer Group will be the first to know. And the first to comment, bless you! Next to take the baton is Jim Richardson from Museum Marketing.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be inviting guest authors to curate this post, writing about the things they’ve read which they think are interesting, important, funny or just plain silly. If you’d like to volunteer, use this form to get in touch.

This week, some random bits and bobs that I’ve spotted…

- Nick Poole from the Collections Trust kicked off an interesting discussion on the MCG list about digital and real: ”…we’re likely to see more ‘back to basics’ rhetoric as the Public Sector Recession bites deeper and there are fewer opportunities for speculative digital projects“. See also the Kids in Museums Manifesto.

- BoingBoing’s post “Burning the library in slow motion” has a take on copyright extensions and suggests that these are leading to orphan works..

- Stuart Jeffries wrote a great thought-piece on the use of camera phones: “…when another friend visited the Taj Mahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times”

- While the ongoing financial future of HE in the UK looks particularly bleak, The Smithsonian reported a 20% leap in museum visitors. Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy announced funding of £680 million to go towards digitisation of the content of French museums and libraries

- Finally – for some reason(!?) this piece on “How to make the most of a museum visit” has been generating a fair amount of Twitter buzz. “…although some of the staff may not be approachable, most people who work in museums do it because they love it and love talking to people about the museum and its collections…”

Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre, V&A, London

Fully booked!

For over five years the annual UKMW conferences have been the place for high quality presentations and discussions on the matters that are shaping museums online today.

The Sackler Centre

By remaining in touch with the leading edge of research, the politics of policy, as well as the day-to-day realities of professional work, UKMW continues to appeal to practitioners and academics, technologists and curators, policy makers and the commercial sector. And the event has built a reputation for the caliber of its speakers, the accessibility of its content, and the focus of its debate.

As museums’ activity online continues to be drawn into the power and possibility of the social Web (of networking and user-generated content) and the machine Web (of semantics and APIs), this year’s conference takes us back to the everyday, sensory and ubiquitous experience and encounters of online content.

Today, the Web is becoming increasingly a more multi-sensory place, with new visual interfaces, rich sound content, where content can adapt to our physical location, and even where interactions can be triggered by bodily movement. Likewise, software and services (just like our content) can today move with us.

This year UKMW will look at digital heritage in the everyday – situated, sensory, social.

Programme

The current committee members are :
Chair
Ross PARRY (2011)
Secretary
Dave PATTEN (2011
Treasurer
Angus KNEALE (2009)
Membership Secretary
John WILLIAMS (2009)
Ordinary Members
Gemma STURTBRIDGE (2011)
Jerry WEBER (2011)
Linda SPURDLE (2011)
Linda ELLIS (2010)
Angelina ROUSSOU (2011)
Jon Pratty (2009)
Rhiannon LOOSELEY (2011)
Ashley HARPER (2011)Web Managers
Mike ELLIS (2010)
Mia RIDGE (2010)

Committee member’s terms are three years. Members may stand for re-election proving they do not occupy the same post for more than two consecutive terms. Nominations, which should be sent to the Chair, Ross Parry (rdp5(AT)leicester.ac.uk), are invited from members who wish to stand for election to the committee.

The following posts fall due for election in 2009